The German Genius

theft of wood, he defended—mainly in legal terms—the traditional rights of the peasants to the gathering of dead wood against the growing need of industry. Private property was yet to become his central concern. 31
    Gradually—and not so gradually at times—Marx grew irritated with the interference by the government censor in regard to the Rheinische Zeitung , and in March 1843, he resigned just as the paper was being closed down. His career as a full-time journalist had lasted barely a year, and he now began his life of exile as a professional revolutionary.
    He went first to Paris. He thought he could continue as a journalist, agreeing with Arnold Ruge to serve as a coeditor of a new periodical. Titled the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (the German-French Annuals), it was intended to be an international outlet. However, the Jahrbücher appeared only once, in a double number but without any French authors, so it was scarcely annual and scarcely international. That one issue, nevertheless, contained three seminal articles, two by Marx, “On the Jewish Question” and the introduction to “Contributions to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ,” together with Engels’s “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.” Marx had been impressed by Engels when the latter came through Paris, when they spent ten uninterrupted days in each other’s company, “thus laying the basis for the most successful and significant intellectual collaboration of perhaps all times.” 32 This was no thanks to the French who, despite their own revolutionary credentials, expelled Marx and Ruge in January 1845 and closed down their periodical.
    Undeterred, Marx and Engels founded the German Correspondence Committee, intended to keep communists in different countries in touch with each other (a forerunner of future Communist Internationals). The following year they organized a German Workers’ Society and helped with the League of the Just, a radical secret society. Marx was growing increasingly proactive. In addition to the activities described above, he was helping to arm the workers in Brussels for revolution, making use of his father’s legacy. He was found out and expelled and moved back to Paris, then to Cologne, where he founded yet another new periodical devoted to the revolution.
    The revolution that had been expected (in some quarters) throughout “the hungry forties” finally erupted in 1848 in a number of cities but soon petered out. As the failures mounted, and the conservatives regained the upper hand, Marx was arrested and tried in Cologne for subversion. A brilliant speech won over the jury and he was acquitted. In May 1849 he was in trouble again and was expelled from Prussia, his new periodical being closed down. He tried Paris one more time, was expelled again and, in the summer of 1849, “acknowledging the failure of the ‘deed,’” crossed the Channel to London. He remained there till he died, never losing his hunger for revolution. 33
    M ARX’S N EW P SYCHOLOGY
     
    Marx thought of himself as a democrat but the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt condemned him as one of the “ terribles simplificateurs ” of history. To an extent, Burckhardt was right. Marx gave almost no regard in his writing to the protection of individual rights, assuming that in communist society there would be no need for such a device. “He does not move in the tradition of a John Locke, a James Madison, or a John Stuart Mill, with their concern for a system of checks and balances on the human proclivity to power; their definition of ‘liberty’ and Marx’s is far apart.” 34
    Although he was a man without a country, Marx was a very German writer. Much influenced by Hegel and his examination of human self-alienation imposed by religion, Marx chose criticism—the German scholarly method—to examine alienation in this life. His main focus was Germany and the hoped-for revolution in that country. Germany, he insisted, though backward practically, was “ahead in thought.” The failed revolutions of 1848 played their part in his thinking: one could not expect a revolution from the bourgeoisie—they were simply not up to playing their historical role. A new actor—or hero—must be found. This new actor was to be the proletariat. “A class must be formed,” Marx declared, “which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society…” He was only too well aware that the